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Hell Reappeared -- Sightings

Last week Martin Marty took a look at the debate over hell between Rob Bell and Mark Galli. He returns to the topic again this week to offer some response to the responses he received, including from Mark Galli. He is concerned that he may appear obsessed with hell, though the last time he had spoken of it was 23 years earlier. I invite you to read and note the final sentence.

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Sightings8/22/2011

Hell Reappeared

-- Martin E. Marty

It’s bad journalism to obsess about a topic and inflict it on readers; it’s bad manners for a columnist to be self-referential. So I’ll start off saying “my bad!” and “my bad!” for returning to last week’s topic, “Hell.” And some readers may fear that I am going to obsess about “hell,” after having received so many responses to last week’s column. (Sightings is not a blog but an e-column, and though my e-publisher at The University of Chicago and I at my home study and learn from all your responses, much as we’d like to, we are not in a position to carry on give-and-take responses. (Thanks for those responses.) An exception today:

Obsessively, I obsess about the “hell” topic, writing about it, as I do, every 23 years. Before last week, the last time was in the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard in 1988, published in 1989. I called it “Hell Disappeared. No One Noticed. A Civic Argument.” Not equipped to handle the subject theologically, I kept on my historian’s hat and reported. For example, I could not, in pre-Google times, find a single scholarly article on the subject in an academic journal in the past century. Typical, however, had been advice about hell to public school teachers, who were told to threaten lying children: if you die today with unforgiven sins like lying, you will go to hell. Know that your parents and family will live on without you, able to congratulate themselves while peering over the rim of hell, seeing you roast, and knowing you got what you deserved.

Chicago colleague Arthur Mann, a reverent secular Jew and I, having shared advisorship or oral examination sessions for years, discerned that except in formal and doctrinal concepts, nothing explained late-modern Catholic change more than the disappearance of hell. Televangelists, of course, preached it, and drew crowds. Polls revealed—no surprise—that the majority of Americans told social scientists that they “believed” in hell. They still do, and may for a long time. We did not imply that they were unbelievers but we were suspicious that “bad faith” was characteristic. That is: if they profess to believe that people they could reach and convert could be spared hell, what were they doing wasting time sleeping long, arguing with us, preaching Prosperity Gospels, going to football games, and not joining Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses in ringing prospects’ doorbells. Mann and I would report and ponder and turn the subject over to serious theologians, few of whom picked up the signal to write about it.

Now “Hell reappeared,” and many noticed, especially in evangelicalism, where two books, noted here last week, stirred up discussion. We heard from some thoughtful theological thinkers from that camp. One deserves mention here: Mark Galli, author of God Wins, asked why I called his book “anthropocentric” in approach. For the third time this week I have to say, “My bad.” It was a bad choice of terms. I wanted to say that the very, very hard questions he took up dealt with intellectual questions that “we” anthropoi in the Western Christian tradition addressed—easy questions like “predestination,” but devoted only a couple of paragraphs to the big one about relating God to the “eternal” “hell” of “torment” for those who “never heard of Savior Jesus” and “never had a chance.” Galli is an informed student of theologian Karl Barth and therefore far from “anthropocentric” minded.

I told a friend that I had had enough of “Hell” and was ready again to write on “religion and current American politics.” Response: “How can you tell the difference?”

References

“Hell Disappeared. No One noticed” is in the Harvard Theological Review 78, 1988. Access to the whole article is complex but possible at http://www.jstor.org/pss/1509697.

The first response to Bell’s book, I am told, is from within the Calvinist tradition, commended to me (but I’ve not yet read it) by publisher and professor Quentin Schultze:Christ Alone, by Prof. Mike Wittmer, the book’s website is www.christalonebook.com.

In this summer’s Religion and Culture Web Forum: What does religious education look like in the globalized realities of the 21st century? This was the question put to a distinguished panel at the recent meeting (May 22-28, 2011) of the International Association of Black Religions and Spiritualities (IABRS), an organization that “represents the religions and spiritualities of darker skinned peoples globally.” This month, we feature the response of Dr. James Massey, the male Dalit (India) delegate to the IABRS. Dr. Massey argues that peace among the world’s religions will require finding not only a “common ethic” (per Hans Kung), but an “appreciation of differences.” To both these ends, Dr. Massey calls for “re-looking at the religious traditions.”

Comments

Martin Marty is rightly one of Protestantism's finest public intellectuals. He has earned this reputation over decades of quality work. Further, he's associated with what I consider to be the finest theological school in the world.

This is the reason I'm so critical of these columns. As he stated himself, this is not a give and take blog, but a column. Were this post in a blog (as Bob is presenting it), it would be appropriate to the genre. As a columnist, I continue to find him to be meandering and lacking a meaningful statement. I'm not asking for a formal thesis statement, but give me some clue as to why you're writing something.

What is he actually trying to get across? Again, were he simply posting a conversation starter, that would be different. But he himself states that this is not the case. What is his point?

At least he didn't do what I get most angry about with him. That is when I find him to be discounting the author he is critiquing instead of focusing on the ideas. To me it smacks of ad hominem attacks (others likely see it differently).

Anyway, this is why I'm frustrated each time I read one of his posts. He can do better.

"The language used by the brother who wrote the notice may not have been very clean," an unnamed priest told Italy's La Stampa newspaper, according to The Telegraph. "But the Lord, and the faithful, will understand."

I am a Disciples of Christ pastor, theologian, community activist, historian, teacher. I'm a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary with a M.Div. and a Ph.D. in Historical Theology. I'm the author of a number of books including
Out of the Office: A Theology of Ministry (Energion, 2017), Marriage in Interesting Times (Energion, 2016), and Freedom in Covenant (Wipf and Stock, 2015).